Dispossession (42 page)

“Does she?”

“Sure she does. And that suits her fine, she’s not going to
bother you as long as you’re so obviously wrong about everything.”

I shook my head. These were deep waters, deep and muddy.
Lies within lies, it was all so complicated; I turned to look into the deep and
muddy waters of the river, and Suzie said, “That still doesn’t explain what led
you to Nolan in the first place.”

“No. But look, I was after Scimitar, yes? I knew they’d
sprung my client, and murdered some other kid to do it. It wouldn’t have taken
much for me to find out they were providing security on Deverill’s roads; and I
already knew that Luke was involved in the protests over there. So I go to see
Luke and his friends”—wrong word, maybe, even I wouldn’t choose to call myself
a friend of his, only that I’d never found a better—“and talk to them, spy on
the compounds a bit, find out about the foreign work-gangs. And while I’m over
that side of the country, of course I go to see my mother.”

“But she didn’t know about SUS— about Scimitar. She didn’t.”

“No. But I knew there was a connection between Deverill and
Scimitar, and everyone knew about Deverill and Nolan. He’d been in the papers,
remember, he was a big story and they’d all run features. So my mother tells me
she’s been working on Deverill, she tells me about her and Nolan because she’s
like that, she’s always been very upfront with me about the stuff she gets up
to, she used to love to shock me; and something clicks, something connects
somewhere. Don’t know what, but it doesn’t matter right now. I realise that she’s
in danger if Mrs Tuck ever finds out about the
Journal
or simply decides that Nolan told her what he knew. So I tell her to cut and
run, tell her just enough so she knows who to be scared of but no more, because
if I told her any more she’d decide to investigate Mrs Tuck instead and likely
get her throat cut; and then I’m on my way back to town when I have the
accident.”

That wasn’t right, quite, I’d been heading the other way
when I crashed. Heading back to Luke, perhaps, to warn him too? No, Mrs Tuck’s
whole organisation was no danger to Luke, that was foolish. Something, though,
something had turned me around and taken me back. Still, never mind that for
now.

“So where do we go from here?” Suzie demanded.

I looked at her, she looked at me; she nodded first. Two
minds on but a single track.

“Deverill,” she said. “We’ve got to. Proof or no proof.”

Luke or no Luke.
Deverill wasn’t likely to be in the mood to see us, with his main man tree’d
and skinned, but I didn’t want to remind her of that. Besides, she was right.
One way or another, we had to make him see us.

o0o

He travels fastest who travels alone, maybe; but he travels
a hell of a lot faster in a car than he does on foot, even if someone else is
doing the driving. It had taken us an hour and a half the first time we went
that way that day, following Luke to guide him. Second time, we’d pretty much
done it in ten minutes. We were just coming up to the village when we saw the
big limousine with the black windows coming from the other direction.

“Bingo,” I said delightedly. “That’s Deverill. Flash him
hard, see if he’ll stop. Give him a toot, too. Got to make him look, his driver
might not know the car.”

Suzie flashed and tooted, and the limo slowed as we passed.
I waved frantically over Suzie’s head, uselessly, his windows as dark as ours;
we stopped and scrambled into the road, and yes, the limo had stopped also and
the driver was getting out. I didn’t know him, but that was no surprise;
Deverill ran a major operation, many staff. And he didn’t have Dean any more,
to drive him around...

Looked like a Dean-substitute, the driver, bigger and just
as hard. He gazed at us entirely without expression, which was probably a
better idea than the thin smile I was forcing, unconvincing even to me.

“The boss in the back there, yeah? This is urgent, I need
to...”

I needed to talk less, apparently; he already had the back
door open, and was gesturing me inside.

I bent over, peering in and already folding to let my body
follow my gaze, so that I could sit and talk on a level with Deverill,
tête-à-tête and eye to eye if we couldn’t be mind to mind.

And by the time my mind registered what my eyes were giving
it, my arse was already sinking into soft leather and I was halfway to helpless
as Mrs Tuck smiled graciously at me from the far side of this plush and padded
car.

Feet still on the tarmac outside: my legs stiffened to
thrust me up and out of there, but of course it was too late for that. The
driver had gone from my line of sight; I heard Suzie yelp, Mrs Tuck chuckle.

“Well now,” she said softly. “I was just sending my boys to
look for you, and here you are come to visit. Vernon will be glad.”

o0o

The driver thrust Suzie into the front passenger seat,
though she was spitting and kicking and trying to take his eyes out with a
gouging thumb.

“Shut the fuck up and sit still,” he warned her, equably
enough, “or I’ll hurt your bloke. Get it?”

“You try it, shitfuck, you lay a hand on him and I’ll put
your balls through a bloody mangle.”

But that was bravado and nothing more, and she knew it, he
knew it, we all knew it. I was hostage against her good behaviour, as she was
against my own. I suppose I could have forced a stand-off, one hostage against
another: I was bigger, stronger and significantly younger than Mrs Tuck, I
could have done her some serious damage.

But the driver was a harder bastard for sure than I could
ever bring myself to be. He’d have done things to Suzie I couldn’t bear to
contemplate, let alone replicate, and he wouldn’t so much care what I
threatened in response. Suzie had been wife and lover and partner to me, all in
these few short days of my reborn life; Mrs Tuck was only his employer. Why
should he mind to hear her scream? It was his job, I suppose, to prevent it,
but he did prevent it simply by its being nothing more than his job.

I did nothing, said nothing; after a minute Suzie subsided
to sit in a matching silence, while the driver found a lane he could back into,
to turn this long car and take us all to Arlen Bank where Deverill would be so
glad to see us.

Cars follow character. I knew that but I’d forgotten it, I’d
made unthinking assumptions.
Dean got out of the
limo, Deverill was in the limo, therefore it was Deverill’s limo.
Stupid
bloody assumptions, and look where they’d got us now.

Cars follow character: it was, inevitably, Mrs Tuck’s limo.
There’d been only the two choices parked out front at Arlen Bank when I’d been
taken there for lunch, this and the Jag; and that was no choice at all, if I’d
only been thinking and not assuming. Of
course
it was Mrs Tuck’s limo. A statement necessarily louder than her ex-husband’s,
and distinctly different. Deverill would be happy to be alone in the Jag, where
a limo really required a chauffeur.

The big gates opened noiselessly for us and we swept
through, both Suzie and I glancing involuntarily to the tree where Dean’s body
had been hung. Not there now, of course; some long ladders must have been found
from somewhere to bring it down. Nothing there at all now. I would dearly have
loved to have seen a police car or two, some scene-of-crime officers in their white
nylon overalls, all the signs of an official investigation; but
dream on, Jonty
, Deverill wasn’t going to follow
that route. His man, his to avenge.

Up the long drive and this time not parking out front where
Mrs Tuck’s status allowed her. One word from her, her driver left the Jag
standing solitary and took us around to the old stable yard, where there were
only a couple of other cars remaining. The company staff must have been sent
home, only the hard men kept back in a crisis; and Mrs Tuck sent for, a wise
and efficient voice in a crisis and as hard as any, with all her organisation
to call on...

The limo stopped close by the door and Deverill was already
there, stepping outside with a couple of men at his back. He wouldn’t have been
expecting this, the limo returning so soon; typically he was coming to check it
out himself.

If the driver would only follow basic training, get out to
open the door for his employer, maybe Suzie could slide into the driver’s seat
and hot us away from here, wheels spinning and gears crunching in a mad chase
for freedom...

But of course the driver was trained better than that. He
sat rooted, and Mrs Tuck managed her door all by her own sweet and ladylike
self.

I didn’t move, any more than the driver. Neither did Suzie.
Not from hope or expectation now, not because either one of us had any kind of
plan left—my mind was tracking hers again, I was certain, and her mind was as
numb and empty as my own—but only because sitting still was easier than moving.
This was the event horizon, and nothing but a black hole waited outside the
car. Why hurry? Let it come, let it all come; but we could at least make it
come to us.

“What’s this, then?” That was Deverill, coming to meet her
halfway: a move that probably bespoke their relationship, or he thought it did.
Me, I thought they had a relationship seriously different from that, only I
couldn’t think how to show it to him.

“Prompt delivery,” Mrs Tuck said, her voice redolent with
satisfaction. “As promised. We found them on the way.”

“On the way
here
?”
Deverill didn’t even stoop to peer into the car, he wouldn’t give us that much
acknowledgement.

“Presumably.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t asked.”

That, I thought, was my cue to move. I opened the limo door
and stood up, gazed at Deverill across the car’s wide roof and said, “Mr
Deverill, I need to talk to you.”

“Son, you need to do better than that. Not right now,
though, I’m not ready for you yet. Lock him away,” with a casual gesture to the
men behind him. “And the girl, she’s here too?” He glanced at Mrs Tuck, not
into the car to see for himself. Getting a nod of confirmation, he turned back
to his men. “Put her somewhere else, I don’t want them together.”

“Yes, sir. Er, where...?”

“The Portakabin, for him. That’s what it’s here for. Bring
her into the house.”

“Hey, wait a minute! What the hell are you talking about? We’ve
come to see you of our own choice here, we’ve got some information we think you
need to know. You can’t just lock us up like some high-handed mediaeval baron!
Get real, Deverill, there are laws these days. False imprisonment, kidnap...”

“You get real, Jonty.” His face was heavy, expressionless,
terrifying. “This is the second time you’ve come here today. First time, you
brought some psycho climber with you, killed my lad. His body’s here still. You
want to see it?”

No, I didn’t want to see it, not at any closer quarters than
I already had. I shook my head.

“No, right. But if I show it to the law, I don’t think they’re
going to blame me for taking a few precautions, second time you come.”

He had a case, maybe; but he wasn’t serious. That “if” was
the only significant part of what he’d said. He wasn’t about to show Dean’s
body to the law, that wasn’t his style. Nor would I be laying a complaint about
my treatment. I’d either be too damn grateful for walking out of here alive, or
else I wouldn’t be walking anywhere, except maybe to paradise. Chasing after
Dean.

Suzie opened her door, stood up slowly, reached to take my
hand; and I knew it was futile, but it was engrained too deep in me to be
resisted,
protect the ones you love
. I
said, “At least let Suzie go, she’s got nothing to do with Luke and she can’t
tell you anything more than I can.”

But before he could sneer and shake his head and say
I don’t think so, Jonty. That valuable to you, makes her
valuable to me also
, he was already too late. Suzie had made her pitch.

“No,” she said, “don’t you do that,” she said, and I wasn’t
at all clear which of us she was talking to. “I’m here, and I’m staying here
till we leave together.”

“For God’s sake, Suzie...!”

“Shut the fuck up, you,” and that at least was definitely
directed at me; like the dig of her nails into my palm, a biting reminder,
no adventures without me
.

“She stays,” Deverill said, flat and final. Talking to his
men, not to us. “But not with him. As I said.”

They nodded, and moved towards us; and Mrs Tuck’s driver
made three big men, and I could feel the quiver under Suzie’s skin that said
she wasn’t running unless I ran first, and it was all too late in any case.
Neither one of us was likely to be fast or fit enough to make it out of the
yard, let alone off the grounds and away.

So we stood there tamely, like classic victims, our
body-language rolling us over and showing our throats, saying
do what you will
.

Which—surprise!—they did, as they had always meant to. Mrs
Tuck’s driver took Suzie’s elbow in one big hand, and would clearly have
dragged her away if she hadn’t gone with him under her own steam. One quick,
frightened glance she gave me,
Jesus, Jonty, what
have we got ourselves into here?
and then she went; and I watched her
small figure all the way, in at the door and out of sight, and swore silently,
bitterly to myself and at myself. I’d brought her into this; somehow, I had to
get her out.

Me, I rated two companions on my walk directly to jail. A
silent man on either side, strong hands on my arms to guide and hold me against
any stupidity; they took me the other way, across the yard and out under the
arch.

I’d missed seeing it on the way in, my eyes and mind both
too busy with other questions, but
Portakabin
Deverill had said and a Portakabin there was, newly set on the grass beside the
drive. It was smarter than your average building-site cabin, decked out neatly
in SUSI’s white livery with navy trimmings, the
Scimitar
logo writ large along the side; and the small windows all had a framework of
bars bolted across them. To keep intruders out, no doubt.